Every couple of years, a man comes to our small town and pleads with people never to call police.

A lot of people think that if you live in a small town, everyone knows everyone else’s name. My mom says that’s not true: in reality, there are just a whole bunch of faces that you recognize and can't put a name to. The reason she made that distinction was because in our small town, there is one face we all know, but not by name. It’s the man with the missing eye, missing teeth, and missing everything. Every couple of years, rain or shine or sleet or storm, the man walks down our high street, bloodied and limping and shouting at people to never call the police. The first time I saw this, I was maybe 8 years old, and I honestly mistook him for the Krampus. A monster who existed to hurt people. As a teenager, I learned that the truth was far, far worse. The man’s pleas only last for a day or two at most - some combination of him being picked up by the authorities, him giving up and leaving on his own, or him dying from exposure - before he’s gone again. It was like one of those clockwork machines were a puppet shoots out for 5 minutes per hour to bang on a gong, before disappearing into its little hole again. But one time, I found him in the woods. He was in slightly better shape than he was when he came into town. His teeth were still missing, but both of his eyes were intact. The skin on his face was raw and blistered, but at least it was there, and not melted off or something. He was limping and using a walking stick, but he wasn’t bleeding much at all. He kept moving at a slow, steady pace, and I decided to follow him. I didn’t know why. Maybe because I was bored, maybe because I was excited for an adventure, and maybe because I wanted to learn more about the man. He stopped at a small little cottage. It was small even by the standards of the town back in the day, and by the time I was growing up, it must have been abandoned for decades. But the man pushed open the door, and went inside. I followed him, but I didn’t go inside the cottage. I hid behind a bush and watched as the man cried. After so many years of not seeing his face, I’d almost forgotten that he was a person. But here, alone and with nobody to warn, the man just cried and cried. He sat on the (rotten) floor of the (abandoned) cottage, on (broken) furniture, surrounded by the (moldering) remains of his (dead) loved ones, and wept. After maybe 15 minutes, he stopped crying and startedBurned talking. “I know you can hear me, officer. You hear everything, because you’re always here. This is your house, not mine. It’s mine now. I spent my entire life savings getting my teeth fixed. I spent my entire life savings getting cosmetic surgery to fix my face. It didn’t fix the scarring, but it did fix the massive open wounds on my face. It didn’t fix the twitching around my eye, but it did get rid of the smell. I spent my entire life savings getting my teeth fixed, and my face fixed, and my legs fixed, and my eye fixed. I got a prosthetic eye that is indistinguishable from a real eye. I spent my entire life savings putting myself back together. And you know why? Because I wanted to look like a person again. I wanted to be treated like a person again. And you know why? “I want you to arrest me, officer. I want you to lock me up and throw away the key. I want all this to be over. But I know you won’t do that. Because you’re not the police. You’re the devil. It’s mine now. I’m letting this fall apart. It’s mine now, and I’m going to let it decay and collapse and die, just like everything in my life that you touched. It’s mine now. This is my cottage, my car, my barn, and it will be my grave. I leave it all to the vultures and the worms. It’s mine now. You can stay in here, forever and ever, and never have a victim. It’s mine now. And if you ever come after me again, I will kill myself. Right there, right then. I will ram my car into a tree and die on impact. It’s mine now. And if you ever come after me again, I will kill myself. Right there, right then. It’s mine now. If you ever come after me again, I’ll kill myself. It’s mine now. If you come after me, I’ll kill myself right then and there. It’s mine now. If you come after me, I will ram my car head first into a tree at 60 miles an hour and smash my head open on the steering wheel. Or I will pull the wheel hard to the right and plummet down a 100 foot drop into a creek that isn’t deep enough. It’s mine now. Watch me. It’s mine now. Watch me. Watch me. Watch me. Watch me. Watch me. Watch me. Watch me. Watch me. Watch me. Watch me. *gunshot* That was maybe 6 months after I saw the man for the first time. I never saw him again, but I also never saw the police again. They just... weren’t there, anymore. It was like they’d never been there in the first place. The town is doing a little better these days. There are a lot of new faces around town now, and some of them I can even put a name to.

Every couple of years, a man comes to our small town and pleads with people never to call police.

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